"Arno Soulé is the man's name. She was discharged into his care and we have no record of where they went from here. Sorry."
Joe made his notes. "Arno Soulé? Did anyone check the guy's ID? Check out his credentials?"
"Of course we did. The hospital attorney always does that in amnesia cases where there's a release to someone claiming to be family. I can direct you to our attorney's office."
"Not necessary," Joe said. "You've been helpful, lady. Thank you."
With that, Joe and Frostbite headed back toward the elevators.
They ran the name, but dispatch came back empty-handed. They were told there was no information on anyone named Arno Soulé within two hundred miles of Alton. She offered to run it through the FBI's nationwide database but that would take thirty minutes. So Joe and Frostbite dropped into a Denny's and ordered breakfast and coffee.
"What are you thinking?" Frostbite asked, stuffing toast into his mouth. "You've gone silent."
"I'm thinking someone kidnapped that girl," Joe said.
"Come on, why are you thinking that, Mr. Suspicious?"
"Just a hunch. Just a hunch, Frostbite."
"You think NCIC is going to give us something?"
Just as the question was posed, Joe's handheld radio squawked.
"Detective Tingo," he answered.
"Detective, we've got something through NCIC."
"Go ahead, please."
"Your man Arno Soulé was issued a speeding ticket one month ago. His plates were run. Seems the car he was driving was registered to one Jana Emerich."
"Spell."
"J-A-N-A—"
"J-A-N-A—"
"E-M-E-R-I-C-H. Do you want his address?"
Twenty minutes later, Joe was rapping his knuckles on the aluminum frame of the house at the address given. The man wasn't answering the doorbell, though the detectives could hear it buzzing inside, so they were hammering the door, trying to raise someone's attention.
"Easy, Joe," Frostbite cautioned his partner. "You're bending the damn frame."
"I want to bend the frame. I want to break down the damn door if this Emerich guy doesn't answer his goddam door!"
"Let's come back with a search warrant," Frostbite suggested.
Joe turned to him. "Now that, I like. Let's go."
Three o'clock that afternoon, they returned with a search warrant. Demands for entry were made. Windows were looked into. Then the door was kicked open and the detectives with their uniformed helpers charged inside.
Empty. Everything was gone.
Frostbite looked at Joe, and knew. He'd seen that look on his partner's face too many times not to know.
The hunt had only just begun.
32
Danny
It's been two weeks and there have been several other men for me. Jana tells me what to do and who to do it with and he tells me that I have always liked a variety of husbands not my own. It makes him very happy to see me with them and he makes movies of us and gets money for the movies. So he tells me that I'm helping to support us and now maybe it takes away the pressure on me to sell quilts. We have enough money with his trust fund and with the movie money and it makes me very happy to get to help.
Was I like this before? Honestly, I don’t know, but some days I’m sure the woman in the diary is probably not even me. I have nothing to compare it to, as there are no memories of any of what I read in the diary. I am reading a stranger’s diary for all I know. I have become an eavesdropper.
Gunnar is a huge help. Like always, he sees me through the difficult times so I can just drop out of sight and rest. He doesn’t bother me with details about the movies and the men and I don’t ask. But I do enjoy the parties after shooting.
The days are very long on movie days but those are only on Sundays when the local studios are shut down for the day and the crews can come to our house on their days off. Afterward, we serve ham sandwiches and egg salad sandwiches and everyone eats and laughs and it's rather fun and light. It's probably very good for me to have other people around. Then we say goodnight and I go back to my bathroom and bathe, sometimes for an hour or until the hot water runs out.
Monday comes and half-past noon Jana tells me he's going into St. Louis. He's leaving Niles Scoburg out front to look out for me while he's away. I like Niles and he's very nice to me. We have made two movies together and he’s very gentle. My films are MILF movies. I am the MILF.
I sneak into my sewing room and pull out the diary when Jana is gone. I have waited twenty minutes just to be sure he doesn't circle back.
Then I start reading.
Morning
He kidnapped me. We were staying at the Palmer House in Chicago. They tricked me into coming out of my room.
The man who has me is Jana Emerich. He hates me and he hates Michael, my husband. My husband is Michael Gresham. We live in Chicago. We have—
It abruptly ended. She must have been interrupted, I decide. Maybe her husband came back. I mean, maybe my husband came back. I turn the page and keep reading.
Nighttime
I’m very lonely and cry constantly. Jana threatens me when I do. He holds a gun and points it at my head. It’s been a week now. We’re having sex against my will. At least twice a day. Sometimes three times a day. I’m out of birth control pills and he won’t get me more. I’m terrified I’m going to get pregnant by someone as Jana passes me around when he feels like it.
I press my fingers into my abdomen. There is no swelling there. That's a relief. I don't want a baby. I can hardly take care of myself. A baby just won't do.
I creep down the hallway and sneak around to the kitchen. Pulling open drawers...looking for the knives...selecting a long, flat blade with a hard black handle, turning around and hurrying back to my room. Success! Now I have something. I hide it inside the Chagall bolt, beside the diary. I'm starting to think of it as my diary again. I am Dania and I am reading my own writing. That's why I need the knife: I'm being held against my will. It must mean that.
I need more information. I need that computer. So I sneak back into the hallway and go down four doors on the right. He always keeps it locked. All day and all night. I know this because I've tried the doorknob many, many times when I pass by. A few times I've had a quick look inside and he will be sitting in there at his computer, staring at the screen with that big stupid look on his face. He only saw me watching him one time. He jumped up and came outside the room. He closed the door behind him and smiled at me. This was before I was mad at him.
"This is my workroom," he told me with a bite in his voice. "I keep confidential information in here about my clients. I can't ever allow anyone in there. It would be against the law and the FBI could come get you if you came inside. Do you understand me, Danny?"
"Yes, yes, I understand. I'm not a snoop. I won't even touch that door."
But I did. Lots of times.
One time I tried it and turned away real fast but the door flew open behind me and he grabbed my wrist from behind and spun me around.
"That wasn't an accident," he said like he was spitting the words at me. His lips were grim—turning white around the edges. He squeezed my wrist too hard and I doubled over in pain.
"Sorry," he said. "It's just that I get very upset about my room and the secrets I have to keep."
"I'm sorry," I said through the tears that had formed in my eyes. I don't cry much because I don't feel much. But I felt my wrist getting hurt and that made me cry. Tears were rolling down my cheeks. I hadn't realized he was capable of hurting me. And how scary was that face! The hooded eyes, the head bobbing and weaving and studying me like a snake. His look demanded me to tell, ‘Did I get it?’ I say I got it. I said I am very sorry. Then he released me and I turned away and crept back into my room and meekly closed the door.
I crumpled down onto my bed. He had never hurt me before. And he looked like he could have hurt me much more. Which really scared me and made me want my own knife.
A
nd why had I been in a car wreck? Did he do that to me, too? Because Dania was running away from him? Would he do that? I needed to read more in the diary just to be sure.
I retrieve my diary and curl up with it on my bed. Then I get up and go back to my door and lock it. If I don't, Niles might come in and have sex and I want to read right now. Plus, the door lock gives me time to drop the diary down the space along the wall and my bed if he should suddenly return. So I start flipping pages.
Reading randomly, as fast as I can. Most of it relates how lonely and scared I was. And how sad. But then I come to a place where the ink changes color, red to blue. Now I slow down my reading. I start to realize.
I had many men before, when I was Dania, and I hated Jana for it. I hated it! Now I don't mind it, but then I hated it. I jump from my bed and go to the small bedroom window and look outside for Niles. Sure enough, he's in the driveway, sitting in his SUV, smoking. He has his head back against the headrest and looks very peaceful. For the first time, I realize what the thick grate over my window is for. It isn't there to keep burglars out, like he told me.
It is meant to keep me in.
33
Danny
Coming awake, I roll over and check the clock on the nightstand: 2:14 a.m. Then I hear it again—the sound of crying, a woman—or women, maybe three, maybe more.
Their voices are youthful. They speak through the walls in a foreign language, one I definitely don't recognize. Now the female voices are interrupted intermittently by a man's voice, not my husband's. Then I hear my husband—loud, commanding. He sounds stern and angry. He sounded that way when he caught me in the hallway and hurt my wrist when I was looking inside his office. It makes my stomach clench up just to hear him like this. I feel nauseous, fearful I might vomit. Then someone is slapped and a sharp scream pierces the wall and even more crying than before.
I roll over in bed and pull my pillow up over my ears. The sound is muffled a little but I can still hear the voices, the weeping. Minutes pass. House doors slam. Car doors slam and engines start up outside in the direction of the driveway. The front door of the house—there is the sound of more frightened female voices coming inside. They pass right outside my door, down the hallway, into the room where the other girls are kept crying. Cries of familiarity erupt, joy and happiness mixed with crying and anguish. I pull my pillow away from my head and listen. Some good sounds, some bad sounds, all mixed together.
But they don't last. Almost immediately I hear the voices of two men shouting commands at the girls in that foreign language again, followed by howls of distress and more anger from the men. As the anger is loosed yet again, I hear the sound of slaps and thuds and then more crying and, finally, the sounds of submission: soft weeping, but no more angry voices, neither male nor female.
I am going to wait and then I am going to see about the girls.
If I get caught, I am coming back to my room and taking out my knife.
Then we'll see.
34
Danny
Trang Anh Nguyen was twelve years old and still slept with a teddy bear. The bear had traversed the South China Sea and the Pacific Ocean to make it to San Francisco and then on to St. Louis. From St. Louis it had come east to Alton for an overnight change of trucks. While the changeover was underway, the human cargo was herded into Jana Emerich's house and bedded down for the night on sheets of cardboard and newspapers. Trang Anh still had her windbreaker as well, which was serving as her only protection against the chill in the house.
She crawled between her aunt and the wall and tried closing her eyes, tried feeling sleepy. After twenty minutes of tossing and turning, however, she gave it up and instead took to making up stories about the family she had lost. In the stories, her father was wealthy and owned three oxen and a flock of geese. They had left behind the old thatched home for one made out of wood. Stone floors protected the family's feet from the mud beneath, formed from the rice paddy overflow during the monsoons. They ate fresh fish and hearty rice every day and had their choice of attending school or, like their mother, working in the rice paddies. No other family had ever been so wealthy—not that Trang Anh had ever heard about.
But the real truth of her life?
Her father had died when she was two. Her mother hadn't remarried, being already saddled with six children under ten years of age. Who would take on such a woman? So they huddled inside a thatch hut without windows even during Monsoon when the green fuzz grew between the toes and under the arms. There were trips to the river for cleaning, of course, but it coursed along laden with mud and runoff excrement from the water buffalos that fertilized the paddies and cleanliness was a state of mind always—never existing in the world inhabited by Trang Anh and her siblings. Except for the two youngest kids—still in diapers—the children of Phuc Lo Nguyen all worked from sunup to sundown in the paddies. If they did not work, they would not eat. If they did not eat, they would die. It was a simple math that presented itself as an agonizing choice each day for Trang Anh, who wanted more than anything to go to school.
One day, returning from the river with two large water jugs suspended from her shoulder bar, Trang Anh was swooped up and put inside a truck with a canvas cover by marauding human traffickers. Their mode of operation was always the same: grab girls and boys between the ages of eight and fifteen. Under or over were unacceptable and were thrown into the harbor when their ages became revealed. Too young: overboard. Too old: overboard. Trang Anh watched her younger sister An Li struggle in the cold water of the harbor and finally relax and float away beneath the surface when it turned out she was only six. Trang Anh's last view of her beloved baby sister was of the hand that struggled up and out of the water and poised there as if waiting for another human hand to reach out and save her.
Trang Anh was sobbing as her sister struggled and she was immediately kicked into the hold by the captain's cabin girl. "No crying!" commanded the girl, not much older than Trang Anh herself. "Men don't like girls who cry."
The freighter delivered its rubber and its children upon arrival in San Francisco. They were herded onto converted school buses with the windows painted over and immediately headed out for St. Louis. Half would be distributed among the prostitution ring flourishing there; the rest of them would soon call Chicago their home away from home.
After reaching St. Louis, the girls in Trang's group were driven across the river to Alton. There they were taken to the rambling old Victorian house where Jana and Danny were living.
Danny visited Trang their first night when she heard the girl crying out of hunger.
35
Danny
Trang was one of those bound for Chicago the night Danny listened through the walls. She began to understand that the girls were being beaten and sexually assaulted by the bus driver and his assistant. While the scourge was underway, Jana came into the room and immediately fell upon Trang Anh and ravished her. It was her first time to lay with a man and she was in hell for the entire four minutes it lasted. When it was over, he cuffed her on the side of the head, nearly knocking her unconscious. "Next time, don't cry," he commanded. "If you do you will die."
When the room was abandoned by the men, and the women were again alone, it took everything Trang Anh could call on deep down inside to keep from weeping and calling down his ire. Her body hurt; blood could be felt between her legs; she was terrified and an older girl couldn't dissuade her from moaning and sobbing. Plus, she was starving. One bowl of rice each day was their allotment. Every third day there was a piece of fried chicken from a fast food drive-through where the driver's assistant would order four buckets of chicken. A veritable fight over the chicken would erupt and Trang Anh counted herself among the lucky when she managed to get away with a wing or a thigh. Once, there was even a breast—white meat, succulent and warm—it brought tears to her eyes as she chewed. She couldn't begin to imagine how the Americans lived. Food like this anytime they wanted? It surpassed anything she could believe.
In stole Danny, bringing with her a smoked ham and bread and one sharp knife. She sat down in the middle of the girls and began making sandwiches. There was nothing on the bread except the ham but the girls chewed and chewed without a word, giving off low moans of pleasure as their bellies filled. Seconds were requested and immediately provided.
During all this, no words were exchanged. But Danny looked directly into the frightened eyes of Trang Anh and smiled at her without a word. Trang Anh tried to smile back but her mouth was swollen where Jana had backhanded her when she resisted. He had claimed her and marked her—a boundary violation that brutal men used all too well to make women cower. Strike first, strike hard, and take what you wanted. That was the world in which Trang Anh now found herself.
Danny saw the hurt on the child's face and reached out a hand to touch her softly on the side of the face. The girl flinched and pulled away. Danny understood and didn't repeat her attempt to give solace. Instead, she made another sandwich and wrapped it inside a paper towel and passed it to the girl. That would mean so much more to her than a touch anyway.
Then she whispered to Trang Anh.
"I won't forget you, not ever. I will come for you again. Never forget me and never give up hope, for I am coming again to set you free."
Then voices were heard coming from the other end of the hallway and Danny leapt to her feet and crept back to her room. She still had the ham and the bread with her when she climbed back under her covers. She hid the food beneath her bed. It would be returned to the refrigerator in the morning while she made breakfast for Jana and the drivers.
Then all was still. Danny fell back asleep.
Voices In The Walls: A Psychological Thriller (Michael Gresham Series) Page 14